As Frank Herbert wrote in the first Dune novel, “Beginnings are such delicate times,” and players who are dumped on Arrakis and forced to survive are, indeed, living through delicate times. At a surface level, Dune: Awakening‘s gameplay is as demanding as the sands of Arrakis. It has a clear audience, targeting hardcore survival players and lifelong Dune fans who appreciate its more hard sci-fi approach, and the game’s various features and mechanics would fit right into a Dune novel. I was recently invited to Oslo, Norway to play Dune: Awakening, and after six hours with it, it’s clear there’s a lot of depth in its mechanics.
At a high level, Dune: Awakening has some very lofty goals. It is a shared open-world survival game, so players can encounter, work with, and compete with others. The game takes players through four stages that Funcom internally refers to as Survive, Protect, Expand, and Control. This is not necessarily hard-defined elements in the game but a description in which the gameplay evolves. Players arrive on the iconic planet of Arrakis, also known as Dune, as a prisoner and must survive its endless sands, beginning the Survive “phase.” Here, water is a survival demand and Spice is a rarity; by the Control “phase,” players should be able to wield both as resources of political influence in endgame content, player trades, and so forth.
It is not Minecraft where punching trees can result in resources; this is Dune. Dune is complex and hard to translate to any other medium, so working with tools like cutterays and various fabricators is something new, surviving the sands of Arrakis is complex, and engaging with all of its features is intensive. Teaching players how all of this works is a must, and the early hours of Dune: Awakening are wholly focused on teaching players to survive the hostile planet.
Dune: Awakening – Find the Fremen
Dune: Awakening begins with character creation that lets players decide what they will look like. It was intuitive enough to make someone look like Paul Atreides or even the hairless and pale Harkonnens of the Dune movies, and it led to a scene with a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother asking us questions about our past. This would determine our starting skills before she tasked us with finding the Fremen and shipped us off to Dune. Our prisoner transport was shot down by a mysterious figure who would save us from the rubble, introducing us to the world of Dune: Awakening.
Because of our choices, we started off with a skill that would deploy a powerful turret to automatically attack enemies.
Waking up in a nearby moisture-sealed cave, the opening section of the game walks us through basic equipment like the knife, crafting simple items like healkits, extracting dew from nearby plants, and the freeform climbing system like Conan Exiles. We then met the mysterious figure, named Zantara, who explained we’d need to seize control of an Ornithopter to escape. To do so, we had to go back into the wreckage of the ship and activate the commander’s emergency beacon to bring in reinforcements. In crossing to the downed ship, we needed to avoid sunlight or risk suffering the effects of sunstroke (which modifies every aspect of how a player navigates Dune: Awakening). We killed a surviving prisoner with our trusty knife to take their cutteray, which is used to remove obstacles and obtain resources.
Using the cutteray to identify a weak point in a huge granite stone, we managed to cut away at it and enter the ship. Exploring the ship taught us combat basics like how to parry and how to dash, how dehydration basics work, and its use of Pentashield Barriers (to block off certain areas) introduced us to how dungeons in Dune: Awakening would be managed. After finding the commander, the game shifted toward a cinematic where Zantara and I seized an Ornithopter and flew off, losing the enemies in a storm to also become stranded on Arrakis once more. This time around, we spawned in the main Hagga Basin region of Dune: Awakening.
Zantara was injured in the escape, giving us tasks to survive now through a communication device. We acquired some basic armor, began collecting resources with our cutteray, and crafted a Maula Pistol (which uses darts instead of bullets given the shield technology of Dune and how ineffective firearms became). Then we researched and crafted binoculars and a respawn beacon. What we could not scavenge ourselves, of course, we needed to take from others. We identified a nearby scavenger camp with our binoculars and attacked them for resources. Using those, as well as finding more resources, let us craft a Construction Tool.
The Construction Tool is used to build bases in Dune: Awakening, which in the long run can be quickly recreated through Blueprints. Dune: Awakening has promised some intense base-building mechanics, but for now, we kept it simple and began with a basic little house. Later on, as we acquired more crafting stations, we did need to make a second story for our base. With our house constructed, Zantara instructed us to gather more resources to craft a Blood Extractor and a Blood Sack: another method of hydration. After defeating enemies, players can use a Blood Extractor to store a certain amount of blood in a Blood Sack. Players can drink that raw if necessary (which includes penalties) or purify it at their base. We were taught how to do so before becoming exposed to Spice and receiving a vision directly us toward The First Trial of Aql.
Getting there required us to test everything we had learned so far, as it was the longest trek across Dune presented to us so far. Getting there took us through a stealth sequence, where we were tasked with the sight of gigantic eyes. As we did so, voices narrated various events surrounding the Fremen and Mauddib (although this would not be in reference to Paul per Dune: Awakening‘s spin on the lore). Completing this trial saw us receive a new task from Zantara: finding a moisture-sealed cave to acquire some Fremen components.
It took us some time to find this cave, and in the process, we came across one of the underground labs/dungeons. While it wasn’t without challenge, it essentially involved us fighting through groups of enemies to acquire rare components. Afterward, we finally found the cave, grabbed some resources from it too, and then had to go all the way back to the base to purify water and drink it. And craft a stillsuit that would slowly charge with urine for us to hydrate with.
Afterward, we were tasked with gathering copper ore, creating a refinery, creating a survey launch to find resources, and crossing the dunes again to visit an Outpost. At these locations, players can trade and interact with NPCs, as well as acquire contracts. The contracts we received were all outside the available stomping grounds for us now, but find and defeat, deliver X, and other standard contract work was available to us. The main reason we were sent with the outpost was to acquire a literjohn schematic, which is essentially a flask to carry purified water in. After that, despite not having the stillsuit for very long, we were tasked with researching and crafting scavenger armor, followed by a sandbike (with its own tool research as well).
We were supposed to use the sandbike to navigate to the second Trial of Aql, but it was far to the north of our location. While all movement to this point involved us crossing the open sands as little as possible, out of appropriate fear of sandworms, we needed to use the sandbike to cross a large open area. We knew it was a risk, but we did not leave anything behind in the base. Attempting to make that crossing led to our sandbike and us being devoured by one of Dune: Awakening‘s sandworms.
If players die to a standard enemy, they can complete a Soulslike-style death run back to their death location to acquire their missing gear, which is typically a percentage of resources on hand. However, if players die to a sandworm, then everything on their person, including their armor, weapons, and vehicle if on one, is gone. To this point, avoiding sandworms was simple enough, but we were speeding around on our sandbike with too much abandon to escape the sandworm. Luckily, losing everything proved it’s pretty simple to acquire all the basics again. We had basically gained back everything we lost in roughly 30 minutes of gameplay.
For the last hour or so of our gameplay, Dune: Awakening devs spawned in an Ornithopter for us to play with. It was, by far, one of the safest and fastest forms of travel to this point, although how far into the base game players are required to advance before obtaining one legitimately is unknown. We could cross the entire basin in a fraction of the time it took us to run it. It also made finding scavenger camps, loots, and secrets on top of stone structures much easier. For example, we immediately flew for the tallest landmark we could see and found a downward spiraling cave just begging to be explored.
However, there were two things about the Ornithopter that didn’t quite make sense to us. First, the higher players fly in it, the more fuel it uses. That makes sense, but even when going as high as we possibly could and doing a nose dive down toward the ground, the Ornithopter sustained little damage. Perhaps that’s because players have to craft and maintain it, but it seems very hard to destroy with normal gameplay. Secondly, ships were flying around the Basin that housed soldiers who could deploy and hunt players on the ground. We wanted to land on one and see what fighting them there would be like, but that’s also impossible. Approaching one just sees us repulsed by a defensive array, triggering no enemies in the process and effectively being a huge invisible wall. That’s where our time with Dune: Awakening came to an end.
Combat in Dune: Awakening
Combat can go any number of ways in survival games, and Dune: Awakening finds itself somewhere right in the middle. It is fun and serviceable, even if it is not exactly groundbreaking for the genre. Players can acquire new skills throughout the skill trees, based on archetypes in Dune like the Bene Gesserit, and use those in various combat encounters. Because of my choices at the start of the game, I began with a deployable turret. Throughout my time with the game, it became my go-to skill because it would consistently kill all enemies in the area very quickly. I later acquired a deployable shield wall that would also let me protect myself and let the turret put in the work. The combination was fun, although there were times when I had (or wanted) to get involved myself. My third skill was effectively a poison grenade, but I only used it if my turret couldn’t be deployed.
While we were introduced to a couple of ranged weapons, all of which use darts to fit into Dune‘s lore, there was only one melee weapon: a knife. Fitting again to the lore, it serviced an approachable melee combat style where three hits would stun an enemy, where parries would stun enemies, and melee just requires repetitive hits until the enemy is down. If enemies are using a shield, then the only way to defeat them is to stun them, then use the Slowblade technique to push through the shield with the knife, eventually defeating them that way. Ranged weapons are ineffective against shielded enemies, but they are useful when dealing with a handful of enemies at a time. Even when delving into the dungeon, however, it’s worth noting that we never had to fight more than 4, maybe 5 enemies at a time.
Final Thoughts
Typically, six hours with a game is enough to really get a vibe for the title. That’s not really the case with Dune: Awakening because there is so much to it that we couldn’t experience in this timeframe. Dune: Awakening has a lot of unique mechanical elements, and that’s probably what stood out the most. The mechanics are fully Dune and can be fun to play with. However, having just played six hours of a game that Funcom hopes keeps players immersed for hundreds of hours, it’s hard to say how much we really experienced the game. If anything, it felt like a few grains of sand in the otherwise endless dunes of Arrakis.
Rise from survival to dominance on the most dangerous planet in the universe. Dune: Awakening combines the grit and creativity of sandbox survival games with the social interactivity of a large, persistent multiplayer game to create a unique and ambitious Open World Survival MMO.
Awaken The Sleeper
Your journey begins on Arrakis, with its vast deserts and colossal sandworms. Meet characters from the movies and books as you follow your story across Dune. Discover new allies and enemies and exploit your relationships to uncover the mystery that lies just beneath the surface of the sands.
Choose Your Identity
Craft your identity and build your prowess, from deep character creation to skills and abilities taught by specialists like Mentats and Bene Gesserit. Declare your loyalties by what you wear and become known by what you do, whether you are a specialized master or multi-talented adept.
Explore Arrakis Like Never Before
Dune: Awakening brings the epic landscapes of Arrakis to vivid life. Explore boundless rolling dunes, ancient underground Ecology Labs, and deep canyons pockmarked with caves, where bandits seek easy prey. Wander the bustling villages before braving the lawless and ever-changing deep desert.
Game Rant was provided travel and lodging for the purposes of this preview.